"I was really excited to write this article, because it gave me an excuse to really think about what beautiful code is. I still don't think I know, and maybe it's entirely subjective. I do think the two biggest things, for me at least, are stylistic indenting and maximum const-ness. A lot of the stylistic choices are definitely my personal preferences, and I'm sure other programmers will have different opinions. I think the choice of what style to use is up to whoever has to read and write the code, but I certainly think it's something worth thinking about. I would suggest everyone look at the Doom 3 source code because I think it exemplifies beautiful code, as a complete package: from system design down to how to tab space the characters." John Carmack himself replies in the comments.

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Badly formatted code will make even the most readable of languages a struggle to follow.

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It doesn't matter how well you format your code, if your function / variable names are badly chosen (eg abbreviated names that mean nothing to anyone but the developer) and there's no clear naming convention, then it can be a tough job understanding what the routine does.

I will also add, overly verbose names are bad too (I have one colleague who uses entire sentences in their function names. While it's helps explain what the function does, it makes code readability more challenging).

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Bad program design is a more subjective topic. Most (if not all) developers roughly agree on indentation; and naming conventions only have to be readable, concise and consistent. Not everyone agrees on the specifics of naming conventions, but as long as those 3 criteria are met, then anyone new to the code can quickly understand the standards applied to that particular project.

However bad program design is about the code design of the code - when to you objects, functions, iteration and so on. Sometimes application performance is paramount, which often means writing clever routines in a manner that isn't ideal for a human reading back. Other times you'll be writing a program which isn't going to tax the processor much, so you can afford to opt for readability over performance (Sometimes you're lucky and the optimised code is also the most readable code).

Then you have people using obscure language features or unpopular features (goto is a great example of that. But thankfully there's very few occasions when a goto is the better method of writing a routine).

And after all that, you have the topic of code separation (eg using MVC's in web development to keep server side code separate from HTML).

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At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether your language uses English words or braces - a good developer can make their code readable.

But also, a lot of it comes down to practice. If you've never spent any time developing in C-derived languages, then the C syntax will naturally look a mess. But most developers get used to it and even come to love braces (that certainly happened to me).